Purty Words: To Sleep or not to Sleep

I find that I am no longer keeping up appearances.

Usually I would never let anyone else see my bed unmade (unless perchance that person were sharing my bed).  If I were to use The Great Orange Ball in a photograph, I would carefully arrange it so that the UPC code was hidden.

But, as my nephew said this morning on Facebook,
'These are troubling times.
It is hard to remain calm and appear strong.'

And so I slipped this morning and made coffee without making up my bed, as simple an act as that would have been. 'Social distancing' requires hardly any change in my daily behavior, since I already lived mostly as a hermit.  The occasional lunch or beer at the beach with a friend, my Saturdays' volunteering at the food bank, the ceremonial trip to the library, chatter with the people who make me coffee, chance encounters with neighbors, these were the content of most ofmy face-to-face social activities.  An introvert, I don't even have a cat.

And yet.

', , ,none of us liveth to himself,
and no man dieth to himself.'

Now, it is true that I hope for an introverted death, to be able to enjoy my last breath without anyone else making any sort of fuss around me.  But that in no way means that I am unaware of or immune to others' needs and joys and sufferings. I know the nature of life.

'In the morning it is green, and groweth up,
   but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered.'

But that our common fate seems often to catch us by surprise and make us sad. 

So, I stay awake long into the morning, watching videos of people caught up in the net of becoming and passing away, or reading Albert Camus, or Oscar Wilde,  or the Psalter,  wishing that there were some magic incantation I could spread like an internet virus to bring joy in the morning. Then in the morning I lie in bed towards noontime, hoping to hear the cries of joy.

When I was a priest, and buried people regularly, I always began the office with this anthem, which I was tempted to post on Facebook as a response to my nephew:

'In the midst of life we are in death;
of whom may we seek for succor,
but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins art justly displeased?

'Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

'Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;
shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer;
but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty,
O holy and merciful Savior,
thou most worthy Judge eternal.
Suffer us not, at our last hour,
through any pains of death, to fall from thee.'

I am no longer a priest, so I no longer am one who regularly says 'comfortable words' to people gathered to be made whole again by the power of words.  And yet I find that I turn to words for my own comfort, for my own wholeness.  One of my most powerful memories of the power of words is from a time I said the last rites and then the burial service for a young man who died from brain cancer.  His mother could not read without glasses, she had no prayer book, and she had become in her old age an 'evangelical christian'.  And yet I saw her murmering the words of the Burial Office with me, a memory from her earlier life.

Few images are more powerful than those of the Burial Office, which not only uses the piled up names of God from the anthem I just quoted, but also the idea of God as a knitter:

'Almighty God, who has knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body of thy Son Christ our Lord:  Grant, we beseech thee, to thy whole Church in paradise and on earth, thy light and thy peace.

'Grant that all who have been baptized into Christ's death and resurrection may die to sin and rise to newness of life, and that through the grave and gate of death we may pass with him to our joyful resurrection.'

The first person I knew who died was my grandfather, who was given a Southern Baptist funeral, with lots and lots of lillies and a quartet of male friends singing 'In the Garden'.  Then, before the lid was closed on his coffin, his sister my aunt lifted me up to look at him one last time and told me that I would see him again in heaven.  She used the short version of the Book of Common Prayer.

Now I have problems with the exceptionalism of Christianity.  It just don't scale.  My mother retained a trust in the magic power of words, especially when they were joined with elemental magic.  She told me happily when my younger brother was baptized:  now he was safe from the fires of hell, aut least in her mind. Undoubtedly Hindu mothers tell their children similar happy tales of rites performed to ensure the eternal safety of other family members.

But the power of beautiful words remains, often stronger it seems than the vision of horrors. I suspect this is because it is language that really knits us into one family.  It is language which separates us from other animals.  Yes, birds and whales sing, but they don't produce sonnets and prayer books.  We look  at language as something we have in common with the gods.  Often we don't even consider those barbarians who don't speak our own little language to be people at all.

I find it telling that when the German National Socialists were beginning to institute what many would consider the most barbaric reign in human history, they denied the power of language and fell back onto genetics:  the power of Baptism was denied and people with Jewish ancestry, even though baptized, even though grandchildren of people who had been baptized, were shipped off to be enslaved and killed.

Most modern, civilized, folk, however, recognize that language is a 'sure and certain hope' at least, that all of us babblers are in this together.  I am not alone as I stay awake until the wee hours of the morning.  There is 'a great cloud of witnesses'--about 7.6 billion witnesses--surrounding me.  In the morning I find that they, too, have kept vigil.

It is my hope that we shall awake on the morning when the current plague has passed to recognize that we are all in this together.  The temptation is to divide ourselves into god and demons.

My nephew reminded us on Facebook that in these troubled times more than ever we need to remember that we are all troubled, but that the key to our survive is to be kind to the woman at the grocery store who gets the last carton of eggs.  I am not one of those folk who thinks that people are basically good.  I've seen the photographs of bombed cities and burned churches.  Nor, however, am I I convinced that people are basically bad.  I've seen the photographs of Russian peasant women sharing bread with starving German soldiers.  I am one of those folks who think people have great potential, and that people are always faced with choices, and it is never true that there is no other choice. So, I will end this little essay with a few other lines from the Burial Office:

'So teach us to number our days,
   that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.'









'

All Bets are Off

Or is just that all bets have been called in?

A few months ago I was feeling pretty good about the situation in which we humans had found ourselves.  We had developed the technical abilities to feed and clothe and house all of us.  There were of course obstacles:  the fearful; the politicians who traffic in that fear; and the theologians who claim that fear is  the beginning of wisdom.  But we live in a very complex system, and although I knew that sometimes very small things that have very large effects, I wasn't really expecting it.

Then Voldemort returned.  Overnight, aces high became aces low.  Politicians who are first said there was nothing to fear now are saying that it is such a catastrophe that only they can help us. It's hard to tell if we are as fearful as we are told to be, but we are still listen to the newest information or misinformation. The theologians are either quiet or asking for money to buy miracles.

I have been pondering the return of Voldemort to a soundtrack of my favourite Canadian theologian, Leonard Cohen, the Psalmist who sang of love and death and god and the sacred game of poker.  It would be easy to listen to his last album, 'You want it Darker'. and find it the description of this time:

'If you are the dealer, then I'm out of the game . . . .'

But that brilliant album was made as Cohen was dying.  I am of course also dying, but I ain't dead yet.  (You too, gentle reader, are dying, as you were before Voldemort returned, and if you don't believe me, then I recommend that you listen to Lord Krishna's speech in The Bhagavad Gita before you finish reading this little essay.)

I am dying, but there is no reason to think that humanity is dying as well.  We are reacting in all the crazy ways we do: 'stars' have made a recording of John Lennon's most pretentious song, 'Imagine',;people are putting up Christmas decorations; and we seem to be in a contest to see if we can spend more money for toilet paper or for guns. As Cohen said,

'And those who dance begin to dance

And those who weep begin . . .'

I confess that I am a dancer.   In each night's darkness I listen to Cohen's lyrics and dance, and remember that mankind has been dancing along for thousands of years and has survived.  I listen to the expected statistics of the death from covid19 and remember that the expected survival rate for the first wave of troops on D Day was one in four.

What fools these [we] mortals be. We look at photographs of Paris with the streets empty of people and forget what real disaster in the streets looks like.

Ah the hubris we folks do have.  If we do the killing it is glorious and we do it to make the world safe for whatever ideology claims victory.  If some part of 'the environment' that some of us claim to want to save kills us, it's a crisis.  The environment is a very complex system. (There have even been some of us foolish mortals who are celebrating the outbreak of the virus because it lowers carbon dioxide emissions.)

Of course the return of Voldemort is a catastrophe, but it will almost certainly be a temporary catastrophe.  We have better tools to find a vaccine and cures than we have ever had before.  It won't be an instant gratification, but it will happen.  And unlike the catastrophes that we follow our politicians and theologians to visit upon each other, the houses and shops and factories will still be standing, ready to go back to work to feed and clothe and house us again. The Italians who are singing a new national anthem have it right.  (Ironic, innit, that Turandot is set in China?)  We will win.

If I were one who prays, I would leave you these words of Cohen:

If it be thy will

If there is a choice

Let the rivers fill

Let the hills rejoice

Let your mercy spill

On these burning hearts in hell

. . .

And draw us near

And bind us tight

All your children here

In their rags of light

In our rags of light

All drssed to kill

And end this night

If it be your will

But I am one who dances, and so I leave you these words of Cohen:

Oh my love, oh my love

Take this waltz, take this waltz

It's yours now, it's all that there is

The game is on.

Deja Vu: the Way We Were

A younger friend asked me to join him for pizza yesterday, saying that it might be the last time we could do it.  (I usually have a beach picnic with pizza on Mondays, and he lives across the street from the pizza joint.)  We talked, of course, about the return of Voldemort, and he asked me if I had ever known anything like it before.  At first I said no.  Then I reconsidered and said, well, yes.  It was really a lot like my early childhood, except with panic.

I was born into a world which no longer exists anywhere except in memories and imagination.  People complain that they can no longer afford houses while my parents could.  (The houses my parents bought, however, had one bathroom, small bedrooms, often shared by several kids, no air conditioning. They weren't even wired for  Wi-Fi.) People complain that they can no longer buy cars while my parents could.  (The cars my parents bought required one to roll up his own window, lock the door with a key, and pay extra for an AM radio.  I well remember the infotainment system:  I would stand up--there were no seat belts--and stick my hand out the window and learn about air pressure on surfaces.)  If houses and cars were cheap, televisions weren't.  It would be 1952 before my parents  had a television .  The Republican and Democratic conventions seemed as good as circuses, with banners and parades.  Before there was a television in my own living room, I would be awed at the wonder of it when I visited my grandparents or great grandmother.   My grandfather watched the Friday night fights, sponsored by Gillette  when they sold razors instead of feminism.  My grandmother watched The Grand Old Opry and I was confused by Cousin Minnie who looked a lot like my Aunt Minnie--could they be the same person.  My great grandmother particularly enjoyed the broadcasts of Margaret Truman's playing piano in the White House.

Those years seemed--little did we know--continuous with the world of Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer 1915.  The photograph from the video of that wonderful piece of music  could

have been lifted from my mother's photograph album.  It seemed an idyllic world.  The war was over--except for the 'action' in Korea, for which my cousin Fred had to interrupt his medical studies to go to tend to the far-away wounded, and from which he would send home 16mm movies.  (I don't remember the movies even having been censored.) My parents could easily buy tires for their cars, and sugar for birthday cakes.  I had a bicycle and could ride it wherever I wanted.

There were some imperfections in that idyll, black cats walking through the frame from time to time.  I sometimes went with my mother to visit one of her friends whose daughter lived in an iron lung.  Kids got polio.  (It was mostly kids, but it could happen to adults, who didn't talk about it.  Those were the days when the media never told anything less than the truth unless they were

asked by the president to fudge the facts a bit.  (You probably know Barber's music because it is associated with the death of presidents.)I don't know who paid for my mother's friend's daughter's iron lung.  I don't remember Adlai Stevenson telling parents not to worry, that if their

child contracted polio, their bills would be paid.  I do remember that the March of Dimes had cool  little cardboard dime savers with rocket ships on them.  Being obsessive compulsive, I always placed my dimes heads up and aligned straight across.  Then we were raising money for a polio vaccine, a miracle.

Bad things did happen to adults, too.  Besides the polio virus, there was the tuberculosis bacterium. My cousin Fred's mom, Ruth, had one lung because the other had been removed to keep tuberculosis from spreading.  My aunt Minnie, the one I got confused with the cousin on the Grand Old Opry, was married to a man who was a mystery to me for years:  he lived in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and we didn't visit him.

Then there was the overarching danger to adult and child alike of nuclear annihilation.  Ike, the good old grandfather who would warn of us of the same military industrial complex that had let him lead the allies to victory in World War II, would lead us deeper into the cold war.  For that there was no vaccine, but there was duck and cover. (And yes, my first school desk still had ink wells, left over no doubt from 1915.)

Alas, we were not woke enough to panic.  One summer the swimming pool was closed to try to prevent the spread of polio.  My grandfather built a combination tornado and a-bomb shelter, which my half-uncle and I loved because it had a short wave radio.  (It's a good thing the bomb never fell, because if it had my grandfather would probably have found his batteries drained.) We didn't worry about micro aggressions.  I was raised by folks who had survived the Great Depression and World War II, who told me that sticks and stones might break my bones, but words would never harm me.  I wouldn't argue that they were entirely correct, but I would argue that such an attitude helped one learn to cope without needing a safe space.  One needs a safe space if atomic bombs are dropping, or if polio has paralyzed one's diaphragm.

Now, I am not suggesting that polio and covid 19 are perfect parallels, even though  there were 58,000 reported cases of polio in 1952, with more than 3,000 deaths.  It probably helped then that the population was much smaller, and we saw the USA in our Chevrolet rather than in a Boeing. I am merely suggesting that there have been similar fears abroad before.  Voldemort is someone we have known before.  What flabbergasts me about how we are reacting to his return is that we seem to have lost or abandoned any coping mechanisms.  One day we try to convince ourselves that there is no danger.  The next day we shut down the world.  And that is something I haven't seen before.

Pie Day

For most of human history, there has not been enough.  Not enough food, not enough clothing. not enough shelter, not enough knowledge.  Romanticists like to wax wistful about some time in eden and look to primitive tribes living primitive lives that europeans only choose for short periods as observers for PhD's in anthropology. (Perhaps the reason there are so many hallucinogenic drugs known to primitive folks is that noble savages were anxious to escape reality.) More often than not life was short, nasty, and brutish.  Children often died soon after they were born, and in many instances they were killed because there was not enough food for them or because they were females.  Popular values of today's middle class, such as sexual equality or access to health care or choice of how one lives one's life were not even thought of.  There was no middle class.  No one wanted real change, because there was no change.  Well, I suppose there was the possibility that one's tribe might be conquered and one would become a slave, but for the most part the first 1,998 or so centuries of human existence, things were much the same.

Our political and philosophical and religious systems developed in a time of want.  Jesus said, 'the poor you will always have with you', and we have literally accepted that as gospel.  But we humans  made something that changed the last two centuries into a time very different from the first 1,998.  We made the industrial revolution.

It's very popular and easy for folks born these days to look back at the folks of the 19th century and shame them for their sins such as 'sexual inequality' (by which of course one can only meaningfully mean traditional sexual roles, because if you really think the sexes are equal, you haven't had sex) or slavery, as if they were somehow malicious choices of the framers of the Constitution rather than the way things had been forever.  Indeed what was unique in the formation of the American republic was the idea that things were could to be different.  The ideas that slavery was not ordained by nature  and that women were human beings were part of the founding ideology, in the aspirations of the Declaration of Independence, even if such a utopia were not quite ready for the legalities of the Constitution.

Then came the industrial revolution.  The steam engine would free the slaves, and electricity would bring women the vote.  And, as the productive abilities of industrial capitalism grew, for the first time it has become possible for everyone to have a piece of the pie.  A smaller percentage of the world's population will go to sleep hungry tonight than ever before.  Birth rates are declining, fewer women and children are dying in childbirth, and children are living to become old adults.  'Be fruitful and multiply' no longer means 'have twelve children so maybe two or three will grow big enough to help out in the fields'.

Our political and philosophical and religious systems, however, have not caught up.  We still think and act as if because you have enough to eat, and  more, it must mean that I don't have enough. And far too often we still act as if wealth were a sin rather than an advantage.  (Although of course when we go to buy a new Prius to hold the Bernie 2020 bumper sticker--where do Toyota build those things?--we ask the bank for a loan rather than going to the buy flying a sign at the exit of the Co-op.) We rail against the 1% for being greedy while we daily post the things of which we demand more. 

But we mostly don't notice that there is now a very big pie.  (One might even say a REALLY HUUGE pie.)  My proportionally small piece of that pie is enough.  And, if I want more, there are plenty of ways to earn it.  Those ways might mean I would have to think hard to understand the changing economy, but that is something we all need to do. 

We also need to overcome our fears and defensiveness.  McLuhan said something to the effect that since Sputnik we have all be actors in the same play.  I would suggest that we have all been actors in the same play since World War I. We act as if there were winners and losers.  Tell me, who 'won' World War I?  (I'm tempted to cue the Bhagavad Gita, because it was kinda ahead of its time.) We act as if our little scene is the most important in the play, and we are very jealous when the kabuki folk in another scene get more applause. Will claimed that 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players:  they have their entrances and exits, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.' (You see why Shakespeare chose the name Globe for his theater.) That understanding of our roles still demands flexibility, something which many of us seem to lack.  What has changed dramatically since Shakespeare' time is the size of the drama.  We are now players in a global drama, and for the first time it need not be a tragedy. 

Unfortunately, it is often the very ones of us who have benefited most from industrial capitalism and globalization who are least willing to let them continue to bring more pie to the rest of us.  We live in a world where change is possible, but we think it comes from flying signs and being angry.  We never recognize, for instance, that the food we have abundantly is the result of blind genetic modification, and that now we can see what we are doing.  We don't recognize that the primary force to end poverty is electricity

This essay is getting longer than post-literate folks will read.  I dread just proof reading it.  So, on this Pi day, a day that might lead us to ponder the advances we have made in clothing and feeding and housing the world,  to celebrate our advances in knowledge, and to honor those who are making more advances, let me make a political and philosophical and religious statement of belief:

We do not need to use less of the things we have made.  We need to make more of the things we use.

Let a thousand pies be baked.

Happy Pi Day.

Confessions of a Reformed Hermit

I enjoy living alone.  It was many years before I allowed myself to do that.  Family values, community values, I was taught, were important and necessary.  So, I married.  Joined the local Chamber of Commerce and helped promote community events.  After I was divorced from a wife, I fell into a very marriage-like relationship.  When that ended, I lived in several communities. But, I was always pretty much a loner even then.  Much of my time was spent reading.  Team sports held no interest for me, although I did play tennis.  (It would be years before I realized that athletics and sports are not the same, and I became a devoted long-distance runner and swimmer.  I had one running companion, a philosophy professor.)

I quickly learned that an easy way to gain acceptance and respect in the sorts of new-age/post-hippie communities that proliferated in Santa Fe and Washington State was to be a sort of luddite pessimist.  Such a facade brought me a lot of really enjoyable sex.  It also led me to some friendships with very dear and well-intentioned people.  Unfortunately, what is often true about our tools and concepts is that they are judged by their intentions rather than their results.

Ironically enough, it was one of the woo-woo new-age writers I had discovered in Santa Fe, J. R. Stewart, who led me to take a three-month retreat into darkness, a sort of winterreise,  during which I seriously considered the bases of my understanding of the world.  I had time, and I had a laptop.  I had used computers since 1966, first in Chicago for very specific tasks, when computers were only usable for one job at a time, and then to do graphic design in Santa Fe where the market for brochures and posters and such kept me fat and happy.  But I had never just explored the world wide web for the data available there.  Those three months of casual but wide-ranging research made me realize how unrealistic the woke, progressive pop culture was.  I realized that it is corporate farming using GMO's that allow us to feed the 7.5 billion folk living on spaceship earth today, rather  than cute little organic gardens.  It is nuclear power than can keep the world electrified, rather than the hideous wind and solar farms whose 'ecological dangers' the greens have yet to discover.

And most importantly, those three months made me realize how deeply I had been brain-washed by religion.  I try not to be antagonistic to my friends who remain in the church, who still think they are saving the world by eating non-GMO organic kale, because I've been there and I know how comfortable it is.

But more importantly, I am now optimistic.  With the new tools of the connected world--Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere--we are able to solve problems which were insoluble just a few years before.  A smaller percentage of people will go to sleep hungry tonight than ever before.  The problems we face today aren't our problems but our unwillingness to use the tools that will solve them.  The difficulties are not that we are living in a period of great change, but that we are unwilling to even try to find ways to adjust to change.

Take, for instance, the emergence of AI as an example of one really huge change through which we are going.  Now, I don't really think that 'artificial' is a good description of any kind of intelligence.  I think intelligence is just intelligence. As Teilhard de Chardin began to understand, it has evolved, and spread beyond it's old carbon containers.  But we tend to act as if 'it' must either be a friend or a foe, or that 'we' might determine which path 'it' takes.  I watched a PBS video last night about robots and AI replacing UAW jobs in a Michigan town.  The poor people of Saginaw were still driving SUV's and living in houses and eating enough to keep them fat. But their jobs were gone.  What I found most flawed about the video was that there was no mention that the  jobs that were gone had not existed a hundred years ago.  Things change.  We need to change, too.

I still enjoy living alone.  I'm obsessive-compulsive, perhaps somewhere on the Asperger spectrum.  But I enjoy a large and vibrant community who are beginning to share a sort of hive mind.   This is an odd thing for me, who has always liked to think of himself as an individualist, to accommodate.

I'm certainly not the only one having difficulty accommodating.  As McLuhan pointed out, we have come to live in a global village.  A lot of my new age friends thought that would be a really cool thing, because they had never lived in a village.  But that is a story for another night.  At least in the new on-line village, my community mates don't leave their dishes in the sink over night.